A year ago, British theatre came under attack from an east Asian acting community frustrated by an endemic lack of opportunities and reductive typecasting. Much has been done since then to initiate change, with productions of modern American plays Yellow Face and The World of Extreme Happiness, and two British premieres, Chimerica and The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, bringing a range of Chinese stories and east Asian actors to London's stages. What sets The Fu Manchu Complex apart is that it is written by one of those actors, Daniel York – who has long argued the need for east Asian theatremakers to create opportunities for themselves.

York could have written anything, and almost anything would be an improvement on this cod-Edwardian schlock-horror farce burdened with cock jokes and schoolboy sniggering. As soon as the cast creep on stage wearing stark white phantom masks, singing of how orientals have slanty eyes and mysterious ways, and should never be let anywhere near Shakespeare, it's clear that the satire throughout will be blunt as a sledgehammer, too indignant for subtlety. The main character, Nayland Smith, is a fine upstanding Englishman – "he loves ethnics, darkies and poofs, but only when they're subservient" – fighting the greatest evil his empire has known: the Yellow Peril swarming from China, a pestilence of locusts that threatens western economic hegemony. Here and there you catch the glint of knife-sharp political commentary – only for it to be knocked aside by a clumsy kung fu kick of ribaldry.

To be fair, York has a fine line in jolly-japes one-liners and crude national insults: the Scottish woman dismissed as a "moronic haggistani", the Irish man ridiculed as a "potato-nosher clover-face". But having a character acknowledge that events on stage are "dashedly dramatic" does not postmodern irony make: without it, the play feels weirdly anachronistic.

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